Monday, June 14, 2010

"if u go icc in that lol gear bossz will be haeld not killd"

The title was a comment from the early ages, when the project just started. What can I say? He was a prophet:

14 tries, 2 people alive on heal (or kill or whatever)

Tricks:

Slow worth gold here. Supressers are funny when they walk to VD in slow motion. Abominations chasing the healer are even funnier when can't reach him. Frost mages also cast slower, giving more time to interrupt. Skeleton channel was debated, some saw they pulsate slower, others saw no difference

After VD emotes, one portal phase for healers, then bloodlust, stay outside and nuke (Triev went in one more, healed much less after BL than Misaka). I mention this because there was huge debate in the raid to wait one or two portals after emote. She went up on the first one-portal try. I guess there would be much more people alive if it was done right.

After last week's gear controversy we used stolenlegacy's bluecheck addon, inspected manually and left all epics in the bank. Everyone was in blue gear and it was checked many times just to be sure.

So Undergeared, the 3300 GS blue gear guild is 7/12, and done a boss that was not done by 25% of the "properly geared" guilds and more than 2/3 of all players according to wowprogress. So if you are boosting some guys who don't have gear for second wing, think about that, and /gquit on the spot. There are guilds out there wanting people who can play.

This was the first boss where I had doubts we can do it. The fist tries were terribly quick. We died in no time. Yet we kept on trying, respecced, changed strategies and finally VD was up, and I guess, some GS-loving naysayers are pretty down now. Of course they can still hope in Festergut.

I figured you guys could get Dreamwalker, it's really more about people paying attention and not being dumb, than raw DPS or healing.

I'm curious whether your Hunter has a pet with the +45% boost to healing recieved? Because that would be a tremendous HPS boost on that fight - he parks the pet under the boss, Paladin goes in portals and beacons the boss, then spams Holy Light on the pet - healing the boss for the 45% extra from the pet talent, plus another 10% from the Holy Light glyph.

Evidently it's not necessary, but would've made the fight much easier for you. Heck, the Paladin could probably solo-heal the dragon with this method.

Also, "VD" is an acronym for Venereal Disease. If you're capable of killing all VD's, surely there is a Nobel Prize on the way!

Behind us are all the "easy" bosses. All bosses ahead of us now are either mathematically impossible (Fester, BQL) or "lol can't do in bluz" (Professor, Sindragosa, LK).

Every step this project takes now, is an impossible one. I hear being able to do the impossible is a trait of gods. So, if we are able to proceed, we're either gods, or the reports about the impossibility were greatly exaggerated.

We'll see. Do naysayers still hold on to their "Festergut can't be done" ?

Good job on the kill. What I like with Undergeared is after a kill, it basically means to every other guilds: If you are not there yet (7/12 atm), it means you have morons/slackers in your raid group. Get ride of them and you will progress.

Maladroite also recorded our fight and put it up here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXWeBuFfOJs

@Andru: indeed, skill fights will go down eventually. It does take a bit longer to get to the point where people perform "good enough", since this point is quite a bit higher than it would've been in epic gear. Still, with the first attempt where we're barely good enough being the kill, it does make for amusing video footage :-p

While Festergut isn't mathematically impossible, the timer will still be very tight. Let's just hope we'll be able to squeeze out every drop of DPS we can produce. If any of my fellow Undergeared players are reading, as a small homework assignment, try and optimize your use of cooldowns over a 5-minute period.

As for Sindragosa, she should be doable as well. Assuming three air phases of one minute each (do they take that long?), we'll have 7 minutes to bring down 11.15M HP, which will require 26500 DPS. Between tanks doing less DPS compared to Fester and all the stuff going on during the <35% phase and all the fun debuffs, this too will be tight.

On my warrior alt I've ran ICC10 with a group of casual guildies (though "baddy" rank would be equally appropriate). They managed Fester's enrage just fine, since it is just stand and shoot. We did wipe a few times to Sindra's berserk, because DPS simply plummeted during the last phase of the fight, while it's very much possible to keep doing, say, 80% of what you normally do, if not more (unless you get hideous bad luck on ice tombs). So Sindra will simply be a matter of being good enough. Looking at Valithria, we still have some work to do :-p

@Anon(8:08): increased healing talents on pet won't work with Beacon of Light. So for example you'll heal pet for 14500 (10000 Holy Light times 1.45) but BoL will still only transfer 10000 to Valithria.

Man, if you keep like this and down all ICC Arthas included, I really really need to kill myself, because it took like 3 weeks of extended save for us to kill Arthas with 277 ilevel (people from other server).

Do you know already what kind of composition is better for you people to get Festergut and Queen killed?

@The American anonymousYou can send this message to the american forum:- afaik, not a single player in Undergeared has done LK25 HM. Actually, only a minority has ever seen the LK (10 or 25 man). I'd rather say we are averagely skilled players (out of those that raid).

- Those saying "uuh so what, anyone can clear ICC10, it's easymode".. yes, that's our point. ICC10 is so easymode that a supercasual blue geared guild can get 7/12. If others can't do the same with epix, it's because they suck at playing.

Looking forward to you guys killing festergut. I went from saying "you guys are insane and it cannot be done" to referring a friend of mine to you every time he rages at some better geared player doing fraction of the dps he does. Gearscorelol.

You might have figured it out already, but one way to boost dps a bit on festergut is count down before you pull so that everyone chugs potion of speed/wild magic/whatever potion they feel boosts their damage most on the count of 1. That way you drink it technically before the fight starts have 19 seconds of increased dps and 60 seconds later - have a pot available again.

If you happen to have shaman in a raid, then you could use one of the pots with bloodlust. Different people time lust differently, I've seen both "lust 5 seconds into fight" method and "lust after first pungent blight" method work well.

I do like how, instead of tackling the boss everybody has doubts about, you go around and kill the much weaker bosses, and hope that everybody forgets about the mountain of skeletons that must be in Festergut's room.

What you can do at Festergut is have someone pull him and run out of the room, the boss will follow just outside the gate and despawn after that you have about a minute to position yourselves before he respawns, using this method you get extra dps time on him.

Nice job! And yeah I just learned how bad players can be. My Priest's raiding guild disbanded, leader left us a note "sorry I'm faction changing and going to pvp" and just disbanded it.

So next week I joined a pug with my "casual" 11/12 achievement. Yes, it was one of those "link achi or no inv!!!" PUGs. They promised fast 10 bosses run. And guess what.

We wipe on Marrowgar trash, because leader told Rogue to disarm traps and believed he did, while he didn't. Rogue didn't use tricks of the trade. Warlock overaggroed everything from trash through Lady Deathwhisper to Rotface and kissed the floor most of the time. Warlock was not nuking adds on Saurfang. Paladin tank didn't watch his aggro on festergut after switch or remove his Righteous Fury, overaggroed when the Warrior was tanking, got 10 stacks, wipe. On Valithria Warrior said "it's impossible to tank worms just aoe them" so they ate the mage. Blazing skeleton did craploads of damage before he died. Valithria was sitting a lot of time with 4+ suppression debuffs.

Looking at the logs from your previous boss kills, I'm not sure you will actually be able to beat the enrage timer on Festergut. You're going to have to push your dps harder than ever. Now don't get me wrong, I don't doubt your group's skill; it's simply a question of what is the highest dps a person can do in blue gear?

Your blog is the main factor I used to convince the super-casual guild my alts are hiding in to try ICC-10 just for fun.

It took a lot of convincing but we finally went last Friday. All players were geared at the Naxx, Ulduar level (no one qualified for ICC according to GS). Seven had never raided before except for a few weekly raid quests.

We wiped 17 times in 3 hours but we did end up killing two bosses. More importantly, guild members now know you can have fun dying while learning difficult encounters.

The most satisfying part of the evening was having three players expressed "I did not know I could play that well" in their own ways.

I don't believe we will go to ICC again for a few weeks but we do have a full signed up sheet for Ulduar next Friday!

"There is no advantage in using Bloodlust at the middle or end of the fight, so you should use it at the beginning, when all CDs are ready."

It may be advantageous to use Bloodlust to help healers heal the tanks during 3 inhales, but since we're going to probably need two 3 inhale phases, might not be a good idea to count on BL being available for those.

@anon "There is no advantage in using Bloodlust at the middle or end of the fight, so you should use it at the beginning, when all CDs are ready."

Usually you'd be right. However, here we get a massive bonus to healing with more time in the fight due to the portals - so obviously we used it when we had the most of them, for extra spammage of heavy heals on the dragon.

@Honor's Code

"What effect , if any, do you feel the buff has on your ability to down these bosses?"

That's a pretty good question, and also pretty hard to answer, since we don't exactly have much raiding experience - at least not with these classes we use in Undergeared. It's hard to compare healing on a shaman to tanking on my warrior (and my healing experience in ICC is extremely limited). ;)

@Anon: "Don't you feel that using the 15% or 20% buff is a bit counter to the spirit of the undergeared challanege?"

It's not at all counter to the spirit. As Gevlon has said time and again, the whole point of this experiment is to show that the content is doable in the environment Blizzard has given us, without a gearscore requirement.

It's not like the groups saying you need a 5500+ GS just to step through ICC's front door are trying to do it without the buff...

I'd kill Festergut first before even attempting that: I am pretty confident that Algalon-10 is harder.

In order to beat the enrage timers, Festergut requires about 31k raid dps, whereas Algalon requires 23k (which would be 27,6k with 20% buff).

However, that doesn't include the need to kill collapsing stars, and Algalon requires a fair bit of movement and you can't DPS him while in black hole. On the other hand gastric bloat increases the DPS done by tanks a fair bit.

Also, Algalon's damage is very bursty whereas Festergut's is predictable. Heck, it was somewhat difficult to deal with Algalon's damage with two healers in gear from Tier7 raids and some pieces from Ulduar10 and 25.

Anyhow, congratulations on the kill. I can see at least Festergut and Professor being doable as well. Prove me correct.

Congrats on the kill, but Valithria really is the easiest fight in ICC, if you want to prove that you can push DPS/HPS in blues, Festergut is the way to go. If you want to prove that skill matters more than gear, then Blood Princes is the way to go.

I know you need to do Valithria at some point, but it really does seem like taking the easy way out for this week.

@Anon:The ICC buff really doesn't have an effect, the exact threshold of acceptable gear is mostly irrelevant. The goal is to show that gear which would be considered "unacceptable" is still perfectly capable of downing content with good play. Trade chat pugs that only go 5 or 6/12 still have the buff and yet are outdone by players in blue gear. The goal of this project is to show that gear isn't an excuse and the exact gear threshold (so long as it is suitably low) doesn't change the thrust of that point.

@ Everyone arguing over BL. Having cooldowns up for BL is a matter of communication not some magic timing. Consider a 5 minute fight, if you have a 2 minute CD you will get in 3 uses during the fight this means you have up to 1 minute to properly time that CD to align with Lust or procs or anything else. With proper communication it is strictly speaking optimal (on a pure tank and spank assuming no mechanics where a fast burn is required) to use BL for the execute phase of a fight (assuming you have a large percentage of players with execute mechanics. Using BL early tends to be favored for simplicity since optimal CD usage requires greater planning with late BLs.

Finally I hate to be a nay-sayer because god knows they've been proved wrong at every step however at this point you've gotten past the mostly enrageless coordination checks where good play can compensate for lack of gear and are now really looking at true gearcheck fights with non-trivial enrage timers. The 25% buff next week/ general better play might be able to push you guys over the top but with the dps as it stands now festergut is probably out of reach.

Looking at the DPS from your Deathbringer Saurfang kill which is probably one of the better indications of the DPS in ICC, Festergut looks to be within the realm of possibility. In my raids, FG DPS figures are usually slightly higher than DBS, but you can get a reasonable idea of the ballpark.

The raid DPS on Saurfang was 26.6K, and the minimum needed for Festergut is 31.4K. FG doesn't have target switching and tanks will do extra damage, but ranged do lose DPS due to Vile Gas and having to stack up due to spores.

The DPS will have a very hard job here, but with some tricks to maximise the DPS, I reckon it's just about possible with the 20% buff with outstanding performances, and definitely possible with the 30% buff.

First, on festergut, make sure to have your tank classes who are currently dpsing get 1-2 buffs by using shield wall equivalents for 10-20% increased dps during the low tank damage phases.Second, make sure to heroism after they get these buffs.Third, Sindragosa is probably easier than Festergut mathematically speaking.

@ Anon -Don't you feel that using the 15% or 20% buff is a bit counter to the spirit of the undergeared challanege?

I wouldn't think this is counter to the spirit of the project. What is the spirit? GS is not equal to skill during end-game raiding. Therefor, if with a 20% buff, guilds are still not clearing ICC with epics and tiersets on, and a ilevel200 guild is, it's the same. How many guild, with an average Gearscore of 5000 clear ICC10 by disabling the 20%? I am betting, if any, it's less than 1% of the total guilds out there.

Using the 20% buff isn't against what Undergeared is doing. They're not trying to prove that they are awesome; they're proving that the M&S suck even with T10 and 20% buff. The belief is that people just aren't "geared enough", or their GearScore is too low. The 20% buff doesn't change that.

Gevlon, could I ask how far any of your raiders have cleared into ICC on other toons prior to (or during, even) joining Undergeared?

When you started this project, I recall that you asked for "no "no-life"" people. The purpose was for "a blue-geared bunch of class-inexperienced players with as-casual-as-can-be schedule [to] clear the whole WotLK raiding content".

Yet, it's difficult to imagine that your Undergeared raiders are the same as intelligent casuals who have never stepped foot into ICC before. Things are going down too quickly for people who've never seen the fights, don't know what to expect other than what they read / view online.

So while it's definitely an achievement to have accomplished said kills in blue gear, I don't think that even the intelligent casuals (as mentioned by you last week as 'not being geared') will be capable of pulling their weight in such a manner.

For your curiosity's sake, I'm at 4/12 HC in ICC, with the LK down. (Rotface, not Saurfang is the 4th).

I killed LK on my main realm (on my alt dk tank) the week the 20% buff came out. We're currently struggling with filling raids due to lack of attendance.

However, you are very mistaken if you think our previous experience means much when raiding in blue gear. Yes, knowing the mechanics speeds things up a bit since we don't have to figure them out anew, but we usually need to approach each boss in a way we wouldn't do in a "properly" geared raid. We also notice new stuff that isn't usually an issue on better geared groups.

While you're right that us having some experience is speeding things up, it doesn't mean we wouldn't have done it without it. There are in fact some of our raiders who have much less experience than me and Tazar. There's one of us currently leveling that has only recently killed the Blood Prince Council on his own guild. Manahog is usually the first to say he has no experience on this boss and asking for a quick sum up. After a couple of tries, he's doing as good a job as any of us more experienced raiders would in his place. And he's not the only one.

I understand that you'll be executing non-'standard' plans for each fight, but my thoughts were more oriented along the lines that you've got raiding experience generally (though admittedly, I did phrase it with ICC specifically in mind).

This is an issue that I have with the project - everyone participating is likely to have been in raids, have Champion of the Frozen Wastes or other such titles on other characters, and generally be 'experienced' raiders looking for a challenge. That means higher levels of coordination, awareness and general ability.

The Undergeared project was meant to show up two main things - that "5.5k+ GS" is meaningless (tick, and going well), and that "pst achieve" is meaningless, by demonstrating that a bunch of undergeared casuals can take down ICC10. I'm not sure that it's doing the latter, precisely because you're experienced raiders, and not the heroic-farming casuals who are getting left out of raids.

I wish there was a way to autolink this to every single "lol have at least gazillion gearscore or no invite despite the fact you've been raiding since forever and know what you're doing, gear or no gear" idiot.